GOA: The ninth edition of GoaFest has come as a good surprise for Lodestar UM. The agency won 11 Media Abbys and has thus come out as the clear winner in the crowd. Mindshare with seven Media Abbys came second, while Milestone Brandcom and PHD India won five Media Abbys each to secure the third position.

Of the total 50 Media Abbys which were given out on Day 1 of GoaFest, PHD India emerged as the only agency to have received a Grand Pix. The agency bagged the award for its ‘Be Beautiful' campaign. This year GoaFest received 619 entries from agencies for Media Abbys out of which 150 were shortlisted. 50 of them made it to the winners list.

The final judging process was done only in the presence of media agencies heads. Only one representative from a network group was taken on board, who couldn’t vote for any of its agencies’ entries. There were two preliminary rounds before the finalists were chosen. The shortlisted entries were put on the official website of GoaFest for easy access and transparency.

The other set of awards that were given out on Day 1 were from the publisher category which is a new entrant in Abbys this year. The category received around 63 entries. In this category, while BBCL got five awards, Hindustan Media Ventures received six.

The Advertising Club and chairman of the Awards Governing Council president Pratap Bose mentioned that the effort to add publisher category is to reward the work coming from a platform that connects the media and advertising agencies.